Lake Eyasi

As part of our Tanzania safari trip, we spent a night camping at Lake Eyasi. When we arrived at the campground we realized it was not a typical "campground", more like someone's big backyard. We were the only campers there, which was fine with us! Before dinner the owner took us for a walk and taught us about the area and how the farmers tend to their land. We passed a group of children gathering water in the stream and not two minutes later, I turned around and saw they were all following us! They were amazed with M's leg tattoo and kept pointing and asking questions about it! Such a celebrity. He ended up making a few friends.

By the end they were all holding hands. So cute.

We walked out to Lake Eyasi, or rather, we walked on the lake bed since all of the water is dried up. As you can see in the picture below, it looks like we're just walking on soil, but it is actually the bottom of the lake. It was so dry and crunchy because the lake is salt water.

If you look carefully in the picture above you can see the blue flag which shows where the level of the water used to be. Crazy, eh? In the rainy season it'll fill back up a bit, but nowhere near where it used to be.

This place was ridiculously windy. I've never experienced wind like this before. Strong, constant gusts. It wasn't like a gust of wind here, a breeze here. Oh no, it was constant but warm. And difficult to walk against. The remaining salt from the lake bed blew at my ankles with each step I took! I was seriously nervous that the coconut trees were going to blow down in the middle of the night and squish us in our tent.

We enjoyed a beautiful sunset and when we got back to camp our personal chef had dinner ready for us. Ugh, I miss those days!

We stayed in this area because it's close to a tribe of Bushmen, which we visited the following day. What an experience! I'll blog about that tomorrow!